Amy talks disdainfully about her former husbands. She thinks her late husband is doomed to live alone even though he is moving in with his girlfriend. I have a feeling she would take him back if he begged her.
Amy doesn’t answer my text. She will text me when she wants to see me. She has already put me into her calendar. I won’t prove to be a headache. I have a feeling she won’t contact me now that I talked about my history. I should have kept my mouth shut. It feels more important to feel accepted than to be into someone. I need both to be happy. I need someone who isn’t real. Amy can be unreal when she is anxious.
You wait until you are desperate before you do something, she said.
I don’t like how her mouth feels. I think I smell the onset of a serious disease.
She gave me a photo of her first husband and herself in her twenties with a
woman lover who looked like the young male architect she dated at the time. The abrasive woman left her for an Italian man. Amy had given her a short story she had written and thought that she had left her because of it. When she talked about the plot of the story I thought that she was talking about her relationship at the time with her lesbian lover but she wasn’t. She hasn’t been with a woman in twenty years. I asked her
if she looked at photos of her younger self when she was alone.
She paused, her eyes flattened and she said she did.
I avoid photos of myself in my twenties or thirties.They are painful reminders.
Amy has a need for nostalgia. She has had two husbands. I can never remember which one is the drunk and which one the spendthrift. She has been alone for three years.
You have hooded eyes, she said.
I think my eyes are dopey.
Amy reminds me of how my mother looked when I was in my early twenties.
Could it be the older I get and the older the women are the more I think about my mother?
Amy called me an apologist when I defended her father.
I have very long nipples, she said.
No you don’t, I said.
When I kissed her I thought about the sex addict she doesn’t see anymore who liked to choke her.
Don’t you want someone to take care of you, she said.

About The Writer

Paulus Kapteyn Paulus Kapteyn

Paulus Kapteyn is a writer artist. His work has appeared in several magazines. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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